When Vincent McKenna was convicted of sexual assault in 2000, a conviction that he continues to challenge before the courts, journophile, Jim Campbell of the Sunday World, felt that the time was right to drive the final nail into Mc Kenna’s coffin by describing Mc Kenna as an M16 agent, however, it now appears that it was Jim Campbell who was in the pay of the British State using his position as a journophile to gain access to information about loyalist and republican paramilitaries and then passing that information onto his contacts in the RUC Special Branch/M15. It is believed that the UVF shot Campbell in 1984 as he exposed UVF criminality, the UVF unaware that Campbell was collaborating with the RUC/M15.
Nobody stopped to ask why, Jim Campbell had went to the trouble of describing Mc Kenna as an M16 agent, surely if McKenna was doing anything it was the opposite of what M16 and Martin Mc Guinness wanted. It was Sinn Fein/IRA who was engaged in secret meetings with M16 while IRA volunteers were being slaughtered in their dozens in the border counties. What was Jim Campbell’s motivation for describing Vincent McKenna as an M16 agent? The truth is that Jim Campbell was doing exactly what his Special Branch/M15 contacts were telling him to do; the security services had a need to bury McKenna. McKenna had in his persona as an anti-terrorist campaigner gained an unprecedented insight into the executions of IRA volunteers in the border counties.
Jim Campbell had used his position as a journophile with the Sunday World to try and set McKenna up for assassination, Jim Campbell and those handling him knew well that the IRA would have no issue with McKenna’s conviction for sexual assault, as many members of Sinn Fein/IRA remained within the republican movement when such crimes were exposed, Gerry Adams Snr and Liam Adams as two examples. Campbell’s handlers wanted to ensure that McKenna would never get to tell what he had learned while being exposed to sensitive information, including access to informers. To describe McKenna as a British agent was as good as putting a target on his back. Campbell failed to explain why McKenna had been arrested in relation to the shooting of RUC tout Martin McGartland, or why McKenna had been arrested and questioned about the Omagh bomb.
Jim Campbell had abused his position by trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. In an article published about the murder of journalist Martin O’Hagan, Jim Campbell had this to say:
Martin campaigned for truth and justice and an end to selective political censorship in newspapers in Northern Ireland. The tragic irony is that by giving into these threats from loyalist paramilitaries you only encourage them to be more blatant in their attempts to suppress the truth about their sordid activities.
These are fine words; however, as we see from the McKenna example, Campbell abused his positioned to suppress the truth. Campbell in penning such an article about McKenna in the Sunday World attempted to set McKenna up for assassination. Campbell was shot and wounded in 1984 by the UVF; however, if a journalist abuses his/her position by way of trying to set people up for assassination, then they can expect no sympathy when death or the threat of death is visited upon them in return.
